Fiction after World War II
No clearly definable trends have appeared in English fiction since the time of the post-World War II School of writers, the so-called angry young men of the 1950s and 1960s. This group, which included the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, attacked outmoded social values left over from the prewar world. Interest in the 1970s focused on writers as disparate in their concerns and styles as V. S. Pritchett and Doris Lessing. Pritchett, considered a master of the short story (Selected Stories, 1978), is also noted as a literary critic of remarkable erudition. His easy but elegant, supple style illuminates both forms of writing. Lessing has moved from the early short stories collected as African Stories (1965) to novels increasingly experimental in form and concerned with the role of women in contemporary society. Notable among these is The Golden Notebook (1962), about a woman writer coming to grips with life through her art.
Anthony Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, has also written wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the title A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), is a highly readable account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics from before World War II (1939-1945) to many years afterward. His four-volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalized details that form the basis of his novels. Iris Murdoch, a teacher of philosophy as well as a writer, is esteemed for slyly comic analyses of contemporary lives in her many novels beginning with Under the Net (1954) and continuing with A Severed Head (1961), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), and The Good Apprentice (1986). Her effects are made by the contrast between her eccentric characters and the underlying seriousness of her ideas.
Other distinctive talents include Anthony Burgess, novelist and man of letters, most popular for his mordant novel of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a successful motion picture in 1971; and John Le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell), who has won popularity for ingeniously complex espionage tales, loosely based on his own experience in the British foreign service. His novels include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), A Perfect Spy (1986), The Russia House (1989), and The Night Manager (1993). William Golding displays a wide inventive range in fiction that explores human evil: the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954); The Inheritors (1955), about Neanderthal life; The Spire (1964); and The Paper Men (1984), about an English novelist's cruel behavior to an American scholar. Golding won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983.
American literature
The Lost Generation and After
The years immediately after World War I brought a highly vocal rebellion against established social, sexual, and aesthetic conventions and a vigorous attempt to establish new values. Young artists flocked to Greenwich Village, Chicago, and San Francisco, determined to protest and intent on making a new art. Others went to Europe, living mostly in Paris as expatriates. They willingly accepted the name given them by GertrudeStein: the lost generation. Out of their disillusion and rejection, the writers built a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed.
Romantic clichés were abandoned for extreme realism or for complex symbolism and created myth. Language grew so frank that there were bitter quarrels over censorship, as in the troubles about James BranchCabell'sJurgen(1919) and—much more notably—HenryMiller'sTropic of Cancer(1931). The influences of new psychology and of Marxian social theory were also very strong. Out of this highly active boiling of new ideas and new forms came writers of recognizable stature in the world, among them ErnestHemingway, F. ScottFitzgerald, WilliamFaulkner, ThomasWolfe, JohnDos Passos, JohnSteinbeck, and E. E.Cummings.
EugeneO'Neillcame to be widely considered the greatest of the dramatists the United States has produced. Other writers also enriched the theater with comedies, social reform plays, and historical tragedies. Among them were MaxwellAnderson, PhilipBarry, ElmerRice, S. N.Behrman, MarcConnelly, LillianHellman, CliffordOdets, and ThorntonWilder. The social drama and the symbolic play were further developed by ArthurMiller, WilliamInge, and TennesseeWilliams.
Arthur Asher Miller(October 17, 1915– February 10, 2005)[1][2]was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure inAmerican theatre, writing dramas that include plays such asAll My Sons(1947),Death of a Salesman(1949),The Crucible(1953) andA View from the Bridge(one-act, 1955; revised two-act, 1956), as well as the filmThe Misfits(1961).
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before theHouse Un-American Activities Committee, received thePulitzer Prize for Drama, and was married toMarilyn Monroe. In 2002 he received thePrince of Asturias Awardand in 2003 theJerusalem Prize.All My Sons: Background to the Play
Background to the action of the play
Four years before the action ofAll My Sonsbegins, in the fall of 1943 during World War II, Joe Keller committed the crime that drives the plot. At that time, Joe’s factory made parts for airplanes. One night, the production line at the factory began to turn out cracked cylinder heads. Joe’s deputy manager, Steve Deever, had called Joe at home to alert him to the problem. Joe did not want to lose production or risk being shut down by the government, so he told Steve to weld over the cracks and ship out the faulty parts. He told Steve that he would take responsibility for any consequences, but said that he could not come into the factory that day as he had influenza.
As a result of the subsequent failure of the cylinder heads, twenty-one airplanes crashed and the pilots died. Joe and Steve were arrested and convicted, but Joe had appealed. In his appeal, he contradicted Steve’s (true) version of events, placing the entire blame for the incident on Steve and convincing the court that he himself knew nothing about it. Joe was released from prison, but Steve is still in prison at the time that the play opens.
Shortly after Joe’s conviction, Joe’s son Larry was reported missing in action while flying a mission. Immediately before his last flight, Larry wrote a letter to his then fiancée, Ann Deever, telling her that he had heard of his father’s and Steve’s arrest and was planning to commit suicide. Ann has never revealed the contents of this letter.
Kate Keller knows that Joe is guilty of the deaths of the pilots but says nothing about it. She has convinced herself that Larry is alive because to admit that he is dead is to open the door to the possibility that Joe has caused his own son’s death, an idea that she cannot bear. She supports Joe's deception, and in return, he supports her self-deception that Larry will return home one day.
Ann and her brother George believe that their father is guilty, and have cut off contact with him. But George has finally visited his father in jail, and Steve has convinced him of the truth about the faulty cylinder heads incident.
The play opens on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1947. Ann has come to visit the Kellers at the invitation of Larry's brother, Chris. He has been writing to her for two years and now intends to propose to her. Ann loves Chris and has guessed his intention. On the Saturday night there has been a storm in which a tree, planted as a memorial to Larry, has been broken off by the wind. In the early hours of the Sunday morning, Kate has woken from a dream of Larry and wandered into the garden, where she found the tree broken.
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